Lenny Bruce Again by Edward Azlant

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on August 22nd, 2006

EDITORS’ NOTE: Edward Azlant is a film academic and screenwriter who spent time in the recording industry, where he edited a few Lenny Bruce albums, including the “Curran Theater Concert” and “Thank You Masked Man.”

He has written an article titled “Lenny Bruce Again: Gestapo? You Asshole, I’m the Mailman,” what the author describes as “a reappraisal of Bruce’s work,” with a special emphasis on Bruce’s later, neglected materials.

SHECKYmagazine is priveleged to be the first publication, online or offline, to present Azlant’s essay.

Below is Part I. The rest is linked below.

I

The late stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce suffered every indignity, alive and dead. Alive, he was caught in a time-warp of evolving standards of public language and hounded into oblivion. Dead, he was canonized as a martyr to freedom of speech and human liberation, both sexual and psychological. His legend is retold regularly in film, television, theater, books, and song.

Bruce was always poorly served by other people working his material. In life, it was policemen, whose artless courtroom renditions or mindless transcriptions of his act became the bases for his obscenity prosecutions. These misrepresentations led to the misidentification of Bruce as pointlessly “sick” or “dirty.” In death, it’s been mostly actors and lawyers, often with as little art or justice as the cops. It’s been observed that a corps of actors has spent more time as Lenny Bruce than Lenny did. In death Lenny has become an actors’ dream role of hip cultural rebellion and a lawyers’ perfect martyr for free speech.

But Bruce’s life and art were certainly more complex than that. In a moving obituary written at the time of Bruce’s death in 1966, Jonathan Miller observed the difficulty of Bruce’s circumstance, in which he was caught between two walls of vested interests, villains and sponsors, for whom Bruce had become target or mascot. Miller observed that Bruce had been unwittingly tossed into the front rank of the war of “evangelical sexual shock therapy” and had sadly become “a stalking horse for middle class liberal dares.” The pathos, for Miller, was that while he clearly regarded Bruce as a stage artist of great virtuosity, he also regarded him as an unlettered naif, “intellectually underprivileged,” whose talent derived from “a sort of daft, alienated infantilism,” a puckish innocence (Miller).

It seems from here that Miller, while a perceptive and dedicated Bruce fan, got it only partly right, the part about Bruce serving both sides as target and martyr in a cultural war. The part he missed was the depth, resonance, and complexity of Bruce’s art, and in this Miller was not alone.

The entire 9,000-word piece is here

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